apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Stop waste by connecting the systems in your kitchen, says John Arndt (via 2Modern). The waste of one system becomes the fuel for another in the kitchen John created for this masters thesis.

• The water dripping from dishes on the drying rack waters the herbs.
• The plants also attract dust, keeping the dishes cleaner.
• Friendly worms in the "composter" turns table scraps into food for the plants.

We love the system of terra cotta Flow Jars ...

posted originally from: AT:Kitchen

Fresh Direct will stop using cardboard delivery boxes. They'll use recyclable totes and bags instead. Seems like a big improvement, right?

Bummer is that Fresh Direct will take up to three years to make the change. "Switching our systems will involve a complex re-engineering process," Fresh Direct explained in an email they sent to customers yesterday.

"We believe these efforts will drastically reduce our use of cardboard and eliminate any challenges we currently face with under-packed boxes," the email said. (Speaking of "underpacked boxes", Fresh Direct sent us a solo half-gallon of milk in a huge cardboard box on Thursday.)

Some Streetsblog commenters smell "spin" while others are commend parts of the plan.

What do you make of Fresh Direct's promises "to act as responsible environmental stewards and to work toward better serving our neighborhood." We've posted their five-point plan after the jump ...

posted originally from: AT:Kitchen

Tomatoes, eggplants, rabbits, figs, and a cannibalistic chicken.

Read all about Manny Howard's attempt to farm his 800 square foot Brooklyn backyard in this week's New York magazine and take the video tour.

Neither marital problems nor a nasty maggot problem could stop this guy's ultimate locavore experiment.

posted originally from: AT:Kitchen

Eating food produced close to home is one of the surest ways to reduce fossil fuel consumption, right?

Not so, according to an op-ed in The New York Times. While there are many compelling reasons to eat local, monitoring your "food miles" won't always trim your carbon footprint:

... scientists reached surprising conclusions. Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard.

Of course this study is not a free pass to eat strawberries in December. Instead, this op-ed reminds us to take a more nuanced view of farming.

For a study with a conflicting point of view, check out point #7 on 100milediet.org's list of 13 Lucky Reasons to Eat Local.

posted originally from: AT:Kitchen